Poetry | Fiction | Registers

Category Archives: Stars

Between us, the brane that
makes universes parallel.
What is perpendicular: pain
if we ever intersect. Your foot
pressed on my stomach is an
allegory for rejection, and up
for it: more unloved things
aside from me; Or geometry
where two points make no line;
The star that failed to shine.
As constellations, we are near
on paper. In paper you blazed
like an unwanted poem you
& I line break. & I felt cold.

Determinism was true. See:
All events from the start
end in us not fated to be.
I placed it at knifepoint
just to cry at the impossible:
Somewhere in the Ming
you were sipping wine.
In 30s Shanghai, I drank
to serve men. Always
a disservice to myself.
Servicing these timelines,
they turn into a square, an
opposition. Stars aligning
into queues into spirals
into nadir into breaths
of what has always been.
Somewhere in here I died
during the war. Somewhere
was a place we never met.

Words she took out of my mouth,
she wrote a poem; Found the moon.
I take back what I said about her:
You Gorgon, with a bite you created
the Crescent. If that is not beauty,
there is still the phrase about phases:
On your face, figurative expressions-
All frightening the cores of stars,
showering praise as I cried the night.
A lump in my throat turned to stone.
Which was hard. Difficult to love.
Love too difficult, gravity too easy.

In the grand schemata, you are words in this stanza. In your grand scheme, there is nothing so cosmic like the flings on your strings. If I were flung carelessly like a star across light-years it would be the pinnacle of a civilization. Most don’t go this far however, although you did. You went beyond the end of this piece. Outside the observable universe. Leaving the interior dark. I still shine, casting shadows over what you did.

When the city is too small
for the heart, a walk in a bar is
travelling the horizon of the moon.
Each crater a landmark of progress
but in the same shade that is
unreliable since you circumvented
twice. If craters were large enough to
contain our warmth the universe
compensates by echoing loneliness –
Still, no one can hear the moaning
or the smell the alcohol that clogs
the futility of memory, the taste of
names that spill off your glass onto
the lunar soil. The next civilization
will question the evidence, likewise
aching for why aren’t there more.